The Ender Chest
by Golden Keyblade
Summary: Edit: I tried what the book said last night, and things got even stranger. Read on to see; any theories about this? Rating changed because of what's going on here...
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Hey guys, it's Golden Keyblade. So I was playing **_**Minecraft**_** earlier today and I found something strange; I don't know what it means yet. I was exploring a large ocean in search of an island where I could set up a new Clay Soldiers project (I'm a huge CS buff) and I found a mushroom island biome. That in itself is way cool, but there was something weird: there was this Ender Chest on the island, just sitting in the open. I know for a fact I hadn't been there since I'd never been in a mushroom biome before. Was this a glitch? A hidden feature of the Clay Soldiers mod? I checked in the chest and saw that it contained a book called "STOLEN", but the author's name was "Medusa". I've copied the text here so you'll be able to read it. I'm not sure what any of it means yet, and **_**Minecraft**_** crashed when I tried to close the book, so I assume this is a glitch. **

- Dividing Line -

Stolen. It's all stolen. Everything was $tolen and now there's no go!ng back.

They took everyt#ing from me, and I want it back. I'll kil| them all to get it back, too. They all think I*m harmless and I could never hurt anyone. They have no idea.

Th3re is one way to keep yourself safe from me. First, destroy this book as soon as you read it. Make sure that no one else but you se3s it. If ny0ne else sees it, what it says will |\|o longer apply to you. So des+roy the book. Then go to the house on the mount in. Find the painting and break it. Take it to the end along with a bucket of la\/a and a bucket of wa+3r. Defeat t#e Enderdragon. Throw the painting and the drag0n egg 1nto the lava and then pour wa+er on the lava. You will get one block of 0bsidian. Mine that block and g0 to the mineshaft under the h0us3 back in the O\/erw0r|d. Put +#e obsidian in the seco|\|d chest.

D0 all th3s3 th!ngs, & y0u wi|| be s fe fr0m m3. If |\|ot, you'|| have to come play with me.

- Dividing line -

**A/N: What do you think is going on here? I don't think it's a glitch, at least not a random one. No way would it be an actual message if it was some random glitch. Maybe this was something left in the code that randomly generated with distance. I was a pretty good distance from the spawn, since I'm trying to fill up my world with Clay Soldiers. Or maybe this is an Easter Egg or something, either in vanilla **_**Minecraft**_** or the Clay Soldiers mod. I can't tell. Feel free to speculate in the reviews about what you think is wrong with this world. I've got to go now; breakfast is ready. **


	2. Chapter 2

Okay, so I decided to try what "Medusa" said in that book. It's weird: ever since the crash I couldn't open up the game, and when I tried to access my account from the site, I lost my internet connection; but then when I decided that I would try one more time, to investigate the book, it worked perfectly. In fact, I got a better frame rate last night than I'd ever gotten before. Bizarre.

When I loaded up the world I immediately noticed that the chest and book were both gone. It's a good thing I came up with the idea of copying the contents down, because that is probably the only way I'll ever see the text again. I flew back to the mainland (I'm in Creative mode) and went into the nearest mountain biome. I was pretty sure this was all a bunch of creepypasta junk, since I had already explored this entire area and had even set up a civilization of Light Blue soldiers there.

Except the Light Blues were gone. That's the thing: all of them were gone. I checked to see if I had uninstalled the mod by accident, but the Clay Soldiers still appeared in the Creative menu on their own tab. The monastery I built for them (the Light Blues are passive monks) was still in place and intact, and- perhaps strangest of all- the nexus inside of the monastery was still intact and active, though it had been switched off. I guess I forgot to turn it on or something, so I flipped it on and left.

A few minutes later I saw it. On top of a flat mountain top was a small brick house with a wooden door and a few windows. I knew for a fact I had been up there; I thought it might be a cool spot for the monastery, but I finally decided it would be cooler to build it into the side of the mountains. The house was definitely not there when I was here about a real life week ago. This had to be something to do with the Clay Soldiers mod; no way would Mojang make something like this. But why would Silver and San make something so scary in a totally unrelated mod?

I flew up to the door and landed; I decided I'd stay in Creative mode just to be safe, and I switched my difficulty to "Peaceful" so I wouldn't see any monsters. I opened the door and swore the sound was different; instead of the plain old clattering and squeaking from the door opening, I heard a smooth click as the door swung open with no difficulty at all. Inside it was a fairly standard cabin with a crafting table and some chests, with a furnace and some wooden staircase "chairs" in the corner. I opened some of the chests and saw that they were empty except for a couple of cobwebs; there was nothing of value inside.

The only unusual thing was the large painting hanging on the wall across from the door. It wasn't like most of the game's paintings; those were pretty creepy sometimes, like that one with the Creeper, but they had nothing on this. The painting showed what appeared to be a scene with two Clay Soldiers fighting, but not like we see in the game: these two soldiers were extremely realistic, appearing to be modeled after actual humans. They were engaged in a violent fight, with the yellow soldier punching the purple soldier right in the throat and the purple soldier trying to rip off the yellow soldier's arm. Yellows and purples were the classic rivalry on my server, so it would make sense they were the ones in the fight...except that how could whoever designed this egg possibly know that?

The strangest part of this whole thing was that this was an extremely detailed picture. As in 720p HD detailed. This was more detailed than _Minecraft_ should be able to process, and certainly more than anything around it. I had to work to remember what I was there for: I had to knock this painting off the wall, take it to the End and burn it with the Dragon Egg. Then I had to convert the lava into obsidian, return to this place, go down into some sort of mineshaft, and put the obsidian block into...something. The book made it sound as if there would be another Ender Chest.

But why? So many questions were swirling inside my head: why did I have to burn this particular painting? Why did I have to burn it along with the Dragon Egg? Why did I have to find another Ender Chest if they were all linked up? And how on Earth would the game know if the obsidian the player put in the chest really was made from the lava block that burned up the Dragon Egg and a random painting?! It was all getting too frustrating for me. I shut off the game and decided to do other stuff.

At around 9:00 P.M. I decided to check to see if there were any new posts on fanfiction with theories about what I was experiencing. There were several reviews. One of them said I was copying his story. The other three said that there was something paranormal going on, and that I should risk doing what the book said to appease whatever entity was in the game controlling these events. This was getting weirder by the second. What was going on here? It was just a game, after all; it's not like someone was actually controlling this.

That's where I'm at right now. I'll probably post this in the morning; I'm too tired to post anything right now. To be honest, I keep thinking about that cabin appearing from nowhere and the HD painting on the wall. Whoever made this, be it Jeb or Silver Chiren, they're messed up, hiding a scary secret like this in a game.

I'm not sure how much sleep I'll get tonight.


	3. Chapter 3

I didn't play the game last night. The more I consider everything that happened (and it's getting harder and harder to put it out of my mind), the more I feel like something is seriously wrong. I know you guys think it's supernatural or something, like Herobrine, but until now I thought that was all ridiculous. But not now. Now I'm starting to think there really is something going on that I can't explain. I hope this is still a glitch, but I'm not sure anymore.

I'll try playing again tonight. I'm just terrified that this might turn into something like Ben, where things turn out to be real and he basically goes insane as some entity plays with him. I don't know what it is, but thinking about the old cabin on the hill that definitely wasn't there before...the HD painting on the wall that should be impossible...the strange book that appeared out of nowhere... all that stuff is utterly terrifying.

Why? What's so scary about this, really? I mean, none of this stuff is sinister in itself. I mean yeah, the painting is a bit scary, but it could be innocent fan art. Plenty of people do that. The Ender Chest is nothing particularly scary, and it's not like the book is doing anything. It's just there...or it was until it disappeared. And again, that's not particularly a scary development. No, I think it's the corruption of what we hold familiar that's so scary; that's why we're so scared by finding something brand new in a virtual world.

And that's why I'm going to keep playing until I get to the bottom of this. No matter what it turns out to be.

**A/N: Sorry for the short post, but this game is really starting to creep me out. **


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4 

I'm going to post the full story, but what happened last night was not a glitch or an Easter egg. Something has gone wrong, either with _Minecraft_ or Clay Soldiers mod, and this is all getting way too real for me. I don't know who's doing this to me, or why, or whether this is just my game or if this is something that can affect everyone. All I know is that all of you guys were right: this is most definitely not an Easter egg or glitch. Something strange, something impossible, is going on here, and I'm scared out of my mind about it.

So I'd put the game _Minecraft_ down for a while during the holidays because I was going out of town. But as soon as I got back yesterday I decided to try to follow the advice from one of the comments and create a new world with the same seed. I had written down the seed earlier (I won't give it to you guys in case the same thing happens to you), and I created a new world called "Medusa Test" to check to see if the chest was still there. However, as soon as this world loaded the game crashed and the _Minecraft_ window closed automatically. There wasn't even a crash log; it just closed the game.

Frustrated, I loaded up the game to try again, but for a good ten minutes all I got was an error message which also exited immediately. Finally the game loaded...and the new world I created was gone. It must have been deleted by the crash. Thankful that it wasn't one of my other worlds that I worked so hard on, I created a new world called "EC Test" (Ender Chest). Unfortunately I got the same thing: the new world caused my game to crash, and by the time I reloaded it (it only took five minutes this time) the world was gone. I was getting scared, but I decided I must have copied down the seed wrong and went into my world to see if I could get the seed again.

What I saw scared me so much that I forgot about the seed entirely.

I wasn't in the same place as I had been before. I had quit the game more or less on the same mountaintop where I had found the cabin; now I was in the End Portal room of a Stronghold. I was in Survival mode, and I couldn't reset my gamemode to Creative. In my inventory was a painting, a bucket of water, a bucket of lava, and some snowballs to kill the Enderdragon with. I also had a single pickaxe, but I found that no matter how far I tried to dig upwards, I could never reach the surface. Seriously, I tried digging stairs all the way up past 255 blocks. Somehow the stone was higher than should have been possible.

I walked back down and jumped into the End Portal, as it seemed to be the only thing I could do and there didn't seem to be a way to get back to the rest of the world...even if it did still exist. I entered the End and began throwing the snowballs at the Ender Crystals. I found that each time I ran out of snowballs, they would mysterious appear outside my hotbar, as if someone was giving them to me, someone that I was unable to see.

Finally the dragon was dead. I grabbed the egg and the painting and put them on top of a block. Then I hollowed a space below it and filled it with a single block of lava so it didn't flow anywhere; that would make things easier. Then, with my breath held, I punched out the block. Time seemed to slow down (or maybe my game was just lagging) as both items fell through the air and disappeared in the lava. There was no bouncing, no items on fire. They just burned, falling into the lava and disappearing.

Immediately a horrendous scream emanated from my computer. The sound and music of _Minecraft_ were both set at about 20%, but this was deafeningly loud. I immediately and instinctively muted my computer...and instantly all this crossed the line from eerie into _Twilight Zone_-bizarre. The computer was muted, but the scream was still playing. Out of panic I poured the water on the lava. The lava converted to obsidian, and the screaming immediately stopped. This, somehow, was just as terrifying as the screaming itself; the way it had cut off sounded as if it was an actual part of this demented audio track, not just the end of the recording. The way it sounded was as if someone who had been screaming was suddenly silenced...or worse.

I mined the block of obsidian with the diamond pick and ran for the portal back to the Overworld. I knew what I had to do with this obsidian, and from what I saw it was the last step. For some reason the idea of simply turning off the game never occurred to me; this is going to sound crazy, as if the rest of this wasn't crazy, but it was like my character was silently pleading for me to go on...as if I was the only one who could free him. I have no idea how I knew that at the time, but I'm not just writing that to be dramatic; it was my honest thoughts at the time.

I jumped into the portal, the screen went black, and the Mojang credits and that weird speech began to roll. Usually I skip it, but this time I don't know; I guess I just needed to see something that was a normal part of the game. But this only made things stranger: the text that was normally just a bit of dialogue between two entities (I consider them to be Notch and Herobrine) was now horrendously glitched. The text that wasn't glitched...let's just say I wished it was. The glitchy text was interspersed with words like "DIE", "KILL THEM", and "REVENGE", always capitalized. I'd beaten the game with Clay Soldiers before, as had countless other people; this didn't make any sense! Was it something like that Easter egg in the title that only occurred in one out of a million games?

But the most terrifying thing was the last line of text. All the other sinister text was dispersed randomly, as if the words were coded in but the placement was chosen by the computer. But after the garbled text was a single phrase, a phrase which was terrifyingly clear.

"You stole from Medusa."  
It wasn't even in caps. It was as if this message in the text was intended specifically for me. I immediately opened fanfiction in another browser, found my story, and carefully reread the message. The "author" of the book, the person or entity the game called Medusa, said that someone or many someones had stolen something from her, and that reading these instructions was the only way to stay safe from her as she killed those who stole from her. But now the game said that _I_ was one of the ones who stole from her. Was this like a backstory to _Minecraft_? I have to admit, at this point there was still some part of my mind that was intrigued as well as scared by the whole thing.

I finally respawned, but not back at the default spawn at the yellow town of Genesis. Instead I was standing right in front of the cabin in the mountains. I was also now back in Creative Mode. I took a quick fly around the towns and found that, sure enough, all the Light Blues were still gone. The nexus was turned off again; this time I didn't bother to turn it back on. I flew back up to the cabin and walked in to find that there was now a trapdoor in the middle of the floor leading down to what appeared to be some kind of mine. It looked like this was what it meant by "mineshaft". Nervous but still wanting to follow this through, I descended into the mineshaft.

The shaft was only one block large. I passed some ore on the way down, as well as, oddly enough, Netherrack. At this point I was beyond caring about these minor oddities. I didn't care about that. I got to the bottom and found that the shaft opened into a large stone room made out of obsidian. Redstone torches were casting an eerie red glow across the room. In the center of the room was an Ender Chest, but it had an odd symbol on it: the leering face of a woman with snakes for hair. Medusa. Cute. Real cute. Just like the weird painting, the image seemed way too realistic for _Minecraft_ to handle. Heck, this one was so detailed I doubted whether my computer could even handle it.

This was it. The moment of truth. I opened the Ender Chest and placed the block of obsidian into the chest. I put it into the center spot because why not? Unsure of what to do next, I closed the chest. Immediately I heard yet another scream, but this time it was strangely comforting: it wasn't a new sound, it was a Ghast. I figured this meant the game was going back to normal...or so I thought.

The mineshaft and stuff were still there. Having gotten to the end of the instructions, I reopened the chest. Maybe I had to put in a specific spot? I opened the chest...and there was no obsidian inside. It was gone. In its place was a new object: a second book. It was called "Leave", and its author was again "Medusa". I didn't want to read it; all I wanted at this point was to turn off the game and go to bed. But again I got that strange feeling that my character was begging me to go on. I took a deep breath...and read.

The new message was extremely short. The leetspeak was gone; the message was clear. It was so ominous that I wish it wasn't.

_ You betrayed me. I am coming for you. Beware of the chicken. _

...what? What chicken?! And how had I "betrayed" Medusa? I followed her instructions to the letter! I thought how disappointing this was going to be to everyone reading this on fanfiction...

...and then it hit me. Fanfiction! The first thing that the original book told me was to not show the book to anyone. Somehow I knew that the reason the book vanished when I returned to the world was that Steve destroyed it, to ensure that no one would ever see it again. But I had copied down what it said and posted it on the Internet. I had violated the rules Medusa set forth, and now it was too late and...

..._and how could the game possibly know that I posted the story?!_

I'm not ashamed to admit I panicked. I quickly closed the window and shut down my computer. But it didn't turn off. I repeatedly clicked "Shut down", and even held down the power button, but nothing happened. Finally, panicked and desperate to escape whatever was going on, I got down on my hands and knees and unplugged my computer. After a tense second, the power went off.

I'm writing this from my iPhone because I'm way too scared to turn my computer back on. I don't want to have to deal with this. I'm scared; all I want to do is never play this game again. I don't care about Medusa. I just want to give up and not play.

But I can't give up. That feeling I got from Steve...that was real. I can't explain it, but it's like Steve is begging me for help. I need to see where this is going. I don't know if I am making the right choice, but I have to do this. Even if I decided to quit, I don't think I'd be able to. Medusa wants me to keep playing. No, she wants me to suffer for stealing from her.

I've read your comments. You all said that something supernatural was going on. I wish I could say you're wrong and this is just an Easter egg. I'm not sure anymore.

Stay safe, guys. I'll write again soon...hopefully.


End file.
